I work in a locked down secure desktop environment. Though for developers, we have special login accounts that have more access to the machine. However my normal user account is a normal locked down account so its actually usefull to me to have it so I can simulate actual user conditions. When I need to make fundamental changes to the machine I log off and log back in with an admin account, which is absolutely necessary as a software developer, IMHO. Usually though I can do most development as a normal user, I only need to switch to admin when I need to install something new or add a file to the system in a protected location. Though having a locked down registry is just not feasible because many apps write to the registry to store information. Your app will always need write access to the registry, which is how most secure shops work anyhow. You just can't use regedit to make changes. Our unix systems are locked down as well but again we all have admin accounts we can use when we need to.
From my understanding (and I read nanosystems when it was first published) the point of mechanical computers was that they could opperate at the resonating frequency of the atoms themselves. We can achieve astounding speeds with microelectronics. But in the nano-scale, you have to deal with individual electrons. Individual electrons in this realm behave radically different. You have quantum tunneling effects that could render the devices unstable and inaccurate.
Of course, this can also be used as an advantage, using quantum effects. But the mechanical computers using rod logic, for instance, are not super powerful. They would be simple 8 bit computers that operate in huge conglomerations. If you built a large CPU using nanotechnology, you would probably make it electronic. However, cheap (as in material and design) mechanical computers would be much more efficient. They can receive their power from brownian motion inherent in nature. Using small cams and gears this motion can be captured and put to use. How would you feed power into a molecule in the form of electrons? It could be done but not easily for an autonomous computing unit. Nanocomputing is an entirely different realm, simplicity is the key and complex nanoelectronics aren't simple. But there is room for both, and like you said even other more wild types of architectures we can't even begin to imagine.
I used to work on a team that is designing a public domain nanocomputer design with some researchers in japan and the US. Rod logic is the way the team was focusing when I left the project and had working models in simulations. Its much harder to model electronics at this level and simulate them because of the quantum effects (which are unpredictable and chaotic I believe.)
Of course I could be totally wrong, I haven't followed the latest advances in molecular engineering for a couple of years now. And quantum computing is a whole new ball game and may lead to the best of both worlds, using quantum effects to our advantage. I know some study has already been done on constructing computing devices using buckytubes that use quantum tunneling of electrons to perform tasks.
I think the key though is not speed, but how cheaply and simply things can be constructed because individual computational units should be disposable and easy to construct. We are talking about using billions and billions of them in concert, at this level individual clock speeds of processors is meaningless. I think a large nanocomputer (the size of a sugar cube perhaps) would use a combination of all these technologies. At the lowest level mechanical designs, and at the higher levels electronics and mechanical designs together. At the top level the CPU would behave as a normal computer using electronic inputs and outputs. But internally things diverge into their most efficient forms.
I thought most security exploits that get released by the major groups are usually passed through MS first and allow them time to provide a patch before issuing the details of the exploit. So why are they so upset? Its not MS nor the security experts who are at fault for not patching machines. At least by publishing them they are provided an incentive to staying on top of security holes, instead of simply allowing them to remain secret. I mean none of the major exploits lately (code red, nimda, etc.) have used unpublished exploits. So this shows a failing in MS's procedures for keeping admins informed and a failing in the admins for keeping on top of their networks. Its such a non-issue, I think MS just wants to preempt law suits or some other such silliness.
We are talking about individual atoms in nanomachines. Electrons take on a whole new life at that scale. Mechanical computing (at true nanoscales) is the only way to get away from quantum effects in this realm. Drexler very seriously proposes mechanical computers (at least when I spoke to him about them he was enthusiastic to say the least.)
Rod logic and geard computing devices are so devilishly simple and elegant they are the hands down winner of nano-cpu designs. On a larger scale, electronics would be much better at handling computing tasks, such as handling the tiny mechanical computing units and coalating tasks and data.
Electronic systems would not be any faster than rod logic, if your rods contained, say, 20 atoms. Mechanical computers would be smaller then anything you could design to process electrons. Now, perhaps there will be some combination of this, such as using positive/negative charges on the tips of rods to contain state information but you would actually be shoving large quantities of electrons around. Thats like using a firehose to extinguish a cigarette.
I dont understand why you would rule out a MAC outright. This is what they excel at. Pro tools runs natively on mac's and macs are the standard platform for most pro audio. Why not just go with what works, works well and has a huge user base? You can go cutting edge with linux just because, but for a professional studio I would go with what is proven and works very well. Have a problem with some issue on a mac? Just ask in a newsgroup or any of dozens of message boards. Have a problem with linux (regarding pro audio) and you dont have a lot of places to turn. Slashdot maybe....
We also have supposedly eyewitness accounts of Santa Claus. And Big Foot. And UFO's. Doesn't mean anything, since the eyewitness accounts of Jesus were put down on paper hundreds of years after his supposed resurrection. So all we really have is legend, traceable not to the individuals who actually witnessed it but to the individual who hundres of years later recounted the story. And besides, all the "eyewitnesses" saw was an empty tomb.
Isreal is our ace in the hole. If all else fails, we want a powerful ally in a part of the world that hates the west. We are not trying to simply placate the middle east, we have an active interest in controlling it. That doesn't always mean making people happy. It does mean maintaining control and backing a nation in the middle east that has nuclear weapons and a formidable military is in our own best interest. I never said it was about making the arabs happy. Its about keeping them "in line." Through whatever means necessary. That is the basis of American imperialism.
Osama Bin Laden is primarily fighting to overthrow the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, the major US backed nation in the middle east. King Faud's regime is corrupt and brutal, having public beheadings, public dismembering, executing children, etc. Much akin to the Shah of Iran. Bin Laden wants to overthrow the Saudi royal family. There is actually a lot of support for this activities in Saudi Arabia.
The problem here is... we back the Saudi royals. We arm them and we support their actions against their citizen's. Osama has warned the US many times in the past to not be involved in the internal struggles of Saudi Arabia or else we become combatants in what he perceives as a civil war. We did not remove ourselves from the equation hence we are now part of it.
Imagine this: Osama Bin Laden succeeds in overthrowing the Saudi regime. Who now is in charge of the oil from the largest oil producing nation in the world? An anti-American islamic fundamentalist. Sound like Iran? Except he now controls the oil.
Of course we would never let that happen, so we attack in the name of fighting terrorism. But it all boils down to the gasoline in your car. That is the ONLY reason we have ANY interest in this region of the world, all else is smoke and mirrors. Isreal, Palestine, etc. has nothing to do with it. Mess with our oil, YOU DIE. End of story.
What I dont understand is you are willing to give up rights to catch the "bad guys" when the "bad guys" did not use the medium you are willing to compromise! There is no proof that web browsing or email played any part in any terrorist activities. If I were a terrorist I certainly wouldn't trust any software I didn't personally write, because it would mean my life on the slight chance these things were compromised by the NSA, CIA, etc. etc. All you are proposing is giving up your rights because you feel you need to give something up, not because it will help in any way. Big Brother loves you and the way your mind seems to work.
Maybe the statement he signed isn't accurate
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Brian West Update
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Just being devils advocate here, but perhaps he was so scared and had no good legal backing that he signed the guilty plea to avoid further trouble. This looks like a statement the FBI prepared and asked him to sign, not a confession he himself worded. Perhaps, just perhaps, the FBI did not fully understand what they found but demanded that these are the charges and a guilty plea must be plead according to these charges. Pleading guilty many times is prefferable to pleading innocent and then being found guilty.
But that is certainly no reason for somebody to be put in prison for life (in the extreme cases), for monetarily inconveniencing you. He didn't physically harm you. I'm not saying a cracker shouldn't be punished but being a sysadmin of a web site that gets defaced does not make you a victim of terrorism, it is harassment. Just a thought...
We already have laws that take care of this. It is not now legal to kill people via acts of computer crime. We have laws against bombing, murder, espionage, etc. This is just getting insane, if this keeps up we will live in a bonafide police state the likes of which the world has never seen before. I feel sick to my stomach.
I was offered several high paying and risky jobs at startups but refused them all, preferring to stay in my current gig as a well-paid (not exhorbitantly) consultant in a very vertical market. I figured I didn't want to be one of the layoffs everybody should have seen coming and now I have many friends who got loans based on fictitious stock prices and now owe the banks more then they can probably make in 10 years without the pumped up silliness of their former jobs. So as it stands now I have a great job, many opportunities and in my business work only increases when there are layoffs (downtime!!:-) so I am a happy camper. I used to wish I had taken some of those jobs but got cold feet and now am glad I did. Stability and growth are what its about, not stocks that you HOPE in a year you can sell for what they are worth now.
Except that this is also American policy. Manifest Destiny... We have the utmost right to ursurp any nations sovereign rights for our own needs. I say fair is fair..
If you strong encrypted the data before placing it into a data stream, then you have made the task all that much harder because you now have no sensible data to extract, just seemingly random noise. Just a thought...
What I find interesting is this warping of the intent of certain laws. Taking your gun example... The "leaders" of our country want to make sure we cannot use them "improperly" ie. for things other then hunting, etc. WELL... The right to bear arms was never intended as a hunting law, or a self defense law, it was intended as a law to allow the citizens of this country to keep the government in check, to USE those weapons in a violent fashion against the establishment. Thomas Jefferson said as much. Now take the issue of DeCSS, cdparanoia, etc. These tools are intended for us to use to make sure we have control over the content we purchased. But nowadays, you "license" a media which contains a recording, you do not purchase anything and have no right to do anything to it. Now, I know its not in our constitution, but I think these tools should be legal (or should remain legal) precisely because it hands control back to the individual and away from big brother. But that scares big brother. Regardless, the tools will exist they just have to move underground, just like those who purchase anti-personel weapons in the underground. Its not the "legitimate" uses that count, its the "illigitimate" uses that contain the power to keep things in check.
What you are describing has absolutely nothing to do with art. You are describing the market for "art". How "art" is valued. What does that have to do with creative expression? How can I, a non-visual artist, recreate a piece of computer artwork without having access to the original data? In other words, if I view it on a screen, does that make it any easier to recreate? Not at all. Being able to create facsimile's of art does not invalidate it, no matter how easily copied. Look at music and poetry. They have been copied throughout the ages, very easily, and yet retain artistic merit through and through. Because the act of creation is the art, not the value of the art. I can copy Mozart all I want but that doesn't mean I can sit down and recreate his brilliance. I can even learn to play his music flawlessly, and I still am not creating art, I am copying it.
Though understand, that with the technology needed to construct such a thing comes the technology needed to protect against such a disaster, in theory at least. An active space elevator with trillions upon trillions of nanomachines maintaining it could be made to never fall, or to have safety devices such as a failsafe disassembling that takes place, so if it falls all that hits the earth is soft dust.
I agree. Check out Robotica tonight on the learning channel and 9pm. Its got mazes, various other obstacles and challenges, including destruction of your opponent.
There are also untelevised robot challenges that have been running for years. I think the tv stuff has simply got to appeal to the lowest common denominator, ie. violence and sex (the ring girls)
I just turned 30 and still find my age to be a problem. I have 20 years experience writting software and currently do contract work for most of the largest engineering firms in the world. In my circle of peers I am considered the foremost expert in my field, but I still run across managers or engineers who think I'm just some punk kid who doesn't understand what they are trying to accomplish. Of course when I not only excel but far exceed their expectations their attitude changes, but its that way in every company, and since these are large companies it happens more often then I'd like. But all in all its just annoying, I still command the money I demand per my experience and as I am the leading developer in my field its not much of a damper.
When I was 22 I had this problem on a much more massive scale, I was the chief developer for a semi-large company and they still referred to me as kiddo and I had to leave the company because they wouldn't pay me what my experience and skills demanded. Somebody else did:-)
Well so far humans have not developed armored skin to hamper the penetration of scalpels. I dont think a simple life form like a virus or a bacteria could use evolution to stop precision nanodevices. A diamond scalpel with an edge 1 atom wide could penetrate any massive lifeform like a bacteria (massive in comparison to the tools.)
At the scale we are talking about (still decades away) the huge wet sloppy defenses of life forms will be no match for precise engineered devices. No virus or bacteria is as smart as humans. The reason they develop defenses to antibiotics and such medicines is the crude sloppy nature of these medicines, which jam machinery in the bacteria, or use some other mechanism which isn't controlled or precise in any way. If a machine grabs a bacteria and proceeds to slice it up, there is no hope of natural selection defeating this, ever.
I put a bunch of MP3's for a buddies band on Napster, and they are actively selling this CD and make a living from it. He was totally stoked when he found the files on Napster, I told him I put em up there after I already did it (snicker) and a LOT of people downloaded them. But you know what? He got orders for CD's from people who downloaded it from Napster. AND the copyright on this CD was just "bought" by a major name band for inclusion on a compilation and nobody cared in the slightest about Napster. Whats funny is the reason I put them on Napster in the first place is he'd been searching it every day and was bummed that nobody wanted to pirate his band hehe. But then again, he also had every right to complain and demand his songs be removed from Napster.
Seems this story was about "what to do about misinformation regarding open source projects" however the cnet article was as accurate as it could be, and since there IS a MozOffice embryo out there, whats the issue? Anywho... Just my two cents, I dont see this as any big deal at all, I could take the Mozilla code and add the ability to play tetris in it, TetriZilla... So, NOW, if we see an article about TetriZilla(tm) then we can complain!! heh
Slashdot Mirror
I work in a locked down secure desktop environment. Though for developers, we have special login accounts that have more access to the machine. However my normal user account is a normal locked down account so its actually usefull to me to have it so I can simulate actual user conditions. When I need to make fundamental changes to the machine I log off and log back in with an admin account, which is absolutely necessary as a software developer, IMHO. Usually though I can do most development as a normal user, I only need to switch to admin when I need to install something new or add a file to the system in a protected location. Though having a locked down registry is just not feasible because many apps write to the registry to store information. Your app will always need write access to the registry, which is how most secure shops work anyhow. You just can't use regedit to make changes. Our unix systems are locked down as well but again we all have admin accounts we can use when we need to.
From my understanding (and I read nanosystems when it was first published) the point of mechanical computers was that they could opperate at the resonating frequency of the atoms themselves. We can achieve astounding speeds with microelectronics. But in the nano-scale, you have to deal with individual electrons. Individual electrons in this realm behave radically different. You have quantum tunneling effects that could render the devices unstable and inaccurate.
:-)
Of course, this can also be used as an advantage, using quantum effects. But the mechanical computers using rod logic, for instance, are not super powerful. They would be simple 8 bit computers that operate in huge conglomerations. If you built a large CPU using nanotechnology, you would probably make it electronic. However, cheap (as in material and design) mechanical computers would be much more efficient. They can receive their power from brownian motion inherent in nature. Using small cams and gears this motion can be captured and put to use. How would you feed power into a molecule in the form of electrons? It could be done but not easily for an autonomous computing unit. Nanocomputing is an entirely different realm, simplicity is the key and complex nanoelectronics aren't simple. But there is room for both, and like you said even other more wild types of architectures we can't even begin to imagine.
I used to work on a team that is designing a public domain nanocomputer design with some researchers in japan and the US. Rod logic is the way the team was focusing when I left the project and had working models in simulations. Its much harder to model electronics at this level and simulate them because of the quantum effects (which are unpredictable and chaotic I believe.)
Of course I could be totally wrong, I haven't followed the latest advances in molecular engineering for a couple of years now. And quantum computing is a whole new ball game and may lead to the best of both worlds, using quantum effects to our advantage. I know some study has already been done on constructing computing devices using buckytubes that use quantum tunneling of electrons to perform tasks.
I think the key though is not speed, but how cheaply and simply things can be constructed because individual computational units should be disposable and easy to construct. We are talking about using billions and billions of them in concert, at this level individual clock speeds of processors is meaningless. I think a large nanocomputer (the size of a sugar cube perhaps) would use a combination of all these technologies. At the lowest level mechanical designs, and at the higher levels electronics and mechanical designs together. At the top level the CPU would behave as a normal computer using electronic inputs and outputs. But internally things diverge into their most efficient forms.
Anywho just my ramblings
I thought most security exploits that get released by the major groups are usually passed through MS first and allow them time to provide a patch before issuing the details of the exploit. So why are they so upset? Its not MS nor the security experts who are at fault for not patching machines. At least by publishing them they are provided an incentive to staying on top of security holes, instead of simply allowing them to remain secret. I mean none of the major exploits lately (code red, nimda, etc.) have used unpublished exploits. So this shows a failing in MS's procedures for keeping admins informed and a failing in the admins for keeping on top of their networks. Its such a non-issue, I think MS just wants to preempt law suits or some other such silliness.
We are talking about individual atoms in nanomachines. Electrons take on a whole new life at that scale. Mechanical computing (at true nanoscales) is the only way to get away from quantum effects in this realm. Drexler very seriously proposes mechanical computers (at least when I spoke to him about them he was enthusiastic to say the least.)
Rod logic and geard computing devices are so devilishly simple and elegant they are the hands down winner of nano-cpu designs. On a larger scale, electronics would be much better at handling computing tasks, such as handling the tiny mechanical computing units and coalating tasks and data.
Electronic systems would not be any faster than rod logic, if your rods contained, say, 20 atoms. Mechanical computers would be smaller then anything you could design to process electrons. Now, perhaps there will be some combination of this, such as using positive/negative charges on the tips of rods to contain state information but you would actually be shoving large quantities of electrons around. Thats like using a firehose to extinguish a cigarette.
I dont understand why you would rule out a MAC outright. This is what they excel at. Pro tools runs natively on mac's and macs are the standard platform for most pro audio. Why not just go with what works, works well and has a huge user base? You can go cutting edge with linux just because, but for a professional studio I would go with what is proven and works very well. Have a problem with some issue on a mac? Just ask in a newsgroup or any of dozens of message boards. Have a problem with linux (regarding pro audio) and you dont have a lot of places to turn. Slashdot maybe....
We also have supposedly eyewitness accounts of Santa Claus. And Big Foot. And UFO's. Doesn't mean anything, since the eyewitness accounts of Jesus were put down on paper hundreds of years after his supposed resurrection. So all we really have is legend, traceable not to the individuals who actually witnessed it but to the individual who hundres of years later recounted the story. And besides, all the "eyewitnesses" saw was an empty tomb.
Isreal is our ace in the hole. If all else fails, we want a powerful ally in a part of the world that hates the west. We are not trying to simply placate the middle east, we have an active interest in controlling it. That doesn't always mean making people happy. It does mean maintaining control and backing a nation in the middle east that has nuclear weapons and a formidable military is in our own best interest. I never said it was about making the arabs happy. Its about keeping them "in line." Through whatever means necessary. That is the basis of American imperialism.
Osama Bin Laden is primarily fighting to overthrow the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, the major US backed nation in the middle east. King Faud's regime is corrupt and brutal, having public beheadings, public dismembering, executing children, etc. Much akin to the Shah of Iran. Bin Laden wants to overthrow the Saudi royal family. There is actually a lot of support for this activities in Saudi Arabia.
The problem here is... we back the Saudi royals. We arm them and we support their actions against their citizen's. Osama has warned the US many times in the past to not be involved in the internal struggles of Saudi Arabia or else we become combatants in what he perceives as a civil war. We did not remove ourselves from the equation hence we are now part of it.
Imagine this: Osama Bin Laden succeeds in overthrowing the Saudi regime. Who now is in charge of the oil from the largest oil producing nation in the world? An anti-American islamic fundamentalist. Sound like Iran? Except he now controls the oil.
Of course we would never let that happen, so we attack in the name of fighting terrorism. But it all boils down to the gasoline in your car. That is the ONLY reason we have ANY interest in this region of the world, all else is smoke and mirrors. Isreal, Palestine, etc. has nothing to do with it. Mess with our oil, YOU DIE. End of story.
What I dont understand is you are willing to give up rights to catch the "bad guys" when the "bad guys" did not use the medium you are willing to compromise! There is no proof that web browsing or email played any part in any terrorist activities. If I were a terrorist I certainly wouldn't trust any software I didn't personally write, because it would mean my life on the slight chance these things were compromised by the NSA, CIA, etc. etc. All you are proposing is giving up your rights because you feel you need to give something up, not because it will help in any way. Big Brother loves you and the way your mind seems to work.
Just being devils advocate here, but perhaps he was so scared and had no good legal backing that he signed the guilty plea to avoid further trouble. This looks like a statement the FBI prepared and asked him to sign, not a confession he himself worded. Perhaps, just perhaps, the FBI did not fully understand what they found but demanded that these are the charges and a guilty plea must be plead according to these charges. Pleading guilty many times is prefferable to pleading innocent and then being found guilty.
Dunno, just a supposition...
But that is certainly no reason for somebody to be put in prison for life (in the extreme cases), for monetarily inconveniencing you. He didn't physically harm you. I'm not saying a cracker shouldn't be punished but being a sysadmin of a web site that gets defaced does not make you a victim of terrorism, it is harassment. Just a thought...
We already have laws that take care of this. It is not now legal to kill people via acts of computer crime. We have laws against bombing, murder, espionage, etc. This is just getting insane, if this keeps up we will live in a bonafide police state the likes of which the world has never seen before. I feel sick to my stomach.
I was offered several high paying and risky jobs at startups but refused them all, preferring to stay in my current gig as a well-paid (not exhorbitantly) consultant in a very vertical market. I figured I didn't want to be one of the layoffs everybody should have seen coming and now I have many friends who got loans based on fictitious stock prices and now owe the banks more then they can probably make in 10 years without the pumped up silliness of their former jobs. So as it stands now I have a great job, many opportunities and in my business work only increases when there are layoffs (downtime!! :-) so I am a happy camper. I used to wish I had taken some of those jobs but got cold feet and now am glad I did. Stability and growth are what its about, not stocks that you HOPE in a year you can sell for what they are worth now.
Except that this is also American policy. Manifest Destiny... We have the utmost right to ursurp any nations sovereign rights for our own needs. I say fair is fair..
If you strong encrypted the data before placing it into a data stream, then you have made the task all that much harder because you now have no sensible data to extract, just seemingly random noise. Just a thought...
Effective C++ is generic enough to last for as long as c++ should be around... Forgot who wrote it but its a great book, IMHO..
What I find interesting is this warping of the intent of certain laws. Taking your gun example... The "leaders" of our country want to make sure we cannot use them "improperly" ie. for things other then hunting, etc. WELL... The right to bear arms was never intended as a hunting law, or a self defense law, it was intended as a law to allow the citizens of this country to keep the government in check, to USE those weapons in a violent fashion against the establishment. Thomas Jefferson said as much. Now take the issue of DeCSS, cdparanoia, etc. These tools are intended for us to use to make sure we have control over the content we purchased. But nowadays, you "license" a media which contains a recording, you do not purchase anything and have no right to do anything to it. Now, I know its not in our constitution, but I think these tools should be legal (or should remain legal) precisely because it hands control back to the individual and away from big brother. But that scares big brother. Regardless, the tools will exist they just have to move underground, just like those who purchase anti-personel weapons in the underground. Its not the "legitimate" uses that count, its the "illigitimate" uses that contain the power to keep things in check.
What you are describing has absolutely nothing to do with art. You are describing the market for "art". How "art" is valued. What does that have to do with creative expression? How can I, a non-visual artist, recreate a piece of computer artwork without having access to the original data? In other words, if I view it on a screen, does that make it any easier to recreate? Not at all. Being able to create facsimile's of art does not invalidate it, no matter how easily copied. Look at music and poetry. They have been copied throughout the ages, very easily, and yet retain artistic merit through and through. Because the act of creation is the art, not the value of the art. I can copy Mozart all I want but that doesn't mean I can sit down and recreate his brilliance. I can even learn to play his music flawlessly, and I still am not creating art, I am copying it.
Though understand, that with the technology needed to construct such a thing comes the technology needed to protect against such a disaster, in theory at least. An active space elevator with trillions upon trillions of nanomachines maintaining it could be made to never fall, or to have safety devices such as a failsafe disassembling that takes place, so if it falls all that hits the earth is soft dust.
I agree. Check out Robotica tonight on the learning channel and 9pm. Its got mazes, various other obstacles and challenges, including destruction of your opponent. There are also untelevised robot challenges that have been running for years. I think the tv stuff has simply got to appeal to the lowest common denominator, ie. violence and sex (the ring girls)
Ummm, maybe many people who have survived cancer had this treatment, so what? Many of them drank kool aid too. Kool Aid cures cancer!!!
I just turned 30 and still find my age to be a problem. I have 20 years experience writting software and currently do contract work for most of the largest engineering firms in the world. In my circle of peers I am considered the foremost expert in my field, but I still run across managers or engineers who think I'm just some punk kid who doesn't understand what they are trying to accomplish. Of course when I not only excel but far exceed their expectations their attitude changes, but its that way in every company, and since these are large companies it happens more often then I'd like. But all in all its just annoying, I still command the money I demand per my experience and as I am the leading developer in my field its not much of a damper. When I was 22 I had this problem on a much more massive scale, I was the chief developer for a semi-large company and they still referred to me as kiddo and I had to leave the company because they wouldn't pay me what my experience and skills demanded. Somebody else did :-)
Well so far humans have not developed armored skin to hamper the penetration of scalpels. I dont think a simple life form like a virus or a bacteria could use evolution to stop precision nanodevices. A diamond scalpel with an edge 1 atom wide could penetrate any massive lifeform like a bacteria (massive in comparison to the tools.) At the scale we are talking about (still decades away) the huge wet sloppy defenses of life forms will be no match for precise engineered devices. No virus or bacteria is as smart as humans. The reason they develop defenses to antibiotics and such medicines is the crude sloppy nature of these medicines, which jam machinery in the bacteria, or use some other mechanism which isn't controlled or precise in any way. If a machine grabs a bacteria and proceeds to slice it up, there is no hope of natural selection defeating this, ever.
I put a bunch of MP3's for a buddies band on Napster, and they are actively selling this CD and make a living from it. He was totally stoked when he found the files on Napster, I told him I put em up there after I already did it (snicker) and a LOT of people downloaded them. But you know what? He got orders for CD's from people who downloaded it from Napster. AND the copyright on this CD was just "bought" by a major name band for inclusion on a compilation and nobody cared in the slightest about Napster. Whats funny is the reason I put them on Napster in the first place is he'd been searching it every day and was bummed that nobody wanted to pirate his band hehe. But then again, he also had every right to complain and demand his songs be removed from Napster.
Seems this story was about "what to do about misinformation regarding open source projects" however the cnet article was as accurate as it could be, and since there IS a MozOffice embryo out there, whats the issue? Anywho... Just my two cents, I dont see this as any big deal at all, I could take the Mozilla code and add the ability to play tetris in it, TetriZilla... So, NOW, if we see an article about TetriZilla(tm) then we can complain!! heh